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By Scorpion05
#241022 BEWARE TEXTWALL AHEAD
Based on the Dev blog: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=52636
Pixelmon should be a bit more difficult and i want to write my experience (cant suggest something to everything), so it cant help on some decissions, on my 4 years i have been moderating a German 1.12.2 pixelmon server with up to 20 players on it in first 2 years. (its still online but a bit dead, we wait for 1.20 to come out of alpha)

1. Legendary Spawn
Its a timer between 12.5 to 29.16 min which then has a 30% chance to spawn a Legendary based on amount of players next to each other and the spawncompatible biome blocks around them.
We ramped that up to 50%, otherwise it would take way to long for the players to get all Legendaries.

Based on this System Players would build anti-afk-farm(which are forbidden at the server)
And ran around the world like maniacs just to find the rare biomes like Mega taiga hills+M
But at the end for pokedex completion, i just teleportet between my homes to stay at the right worldtime at the right biome, in hope the timer ends and spawns the desired Legendary for me so i can stop doing this and do more fun things
its not that hard getting legendaries, only too many specific legendaries, just for pokedex completion, more legendary should use a different system than just "staying around at the right time" should exist, like the ones can be spawned with items on structures

Many Legendaries were specialy handled by players:
As soon as Players knew that Mew gives Dittos, most will stay around in jungle to farm like 3-5 of them and then use 3 ironblock to fail mewtwu (he became worthless).
Arceus was a Legendary most players had, because its about collecting loot and then get portet by someone to the structure.
Then was there legendary weighting, which means at Extreme hills +M, Rayquaza and Jirachi can spawn at dawn/dusk, but Rayquaza has a 66% chance to spawn instead of jirachi, which took me like 8 hours to stay around for 1:30min each time in this biome just to get another rayquaza, also entei spawned generally so many times, nobody even wanted him as a gift.
And then comes Zacian, his stats were broken strong, hes steel/fairy, he spawns forest at day, so it is easily obtainable and breaks trough all createt content… because nearly all legendaries have balanced strong stats, i needed to disable their use in ALL arenas.

2. Arenas and Adventure path
We made an Adventurepath with arenas lvl 13,20,31,42(we didnt managed to make more) but needed to disable natural spawning and use pixelmon spawners so players dont get strong pkm to fast, which makes the world look at little bit dead, if you are not next to spawner. I personally dislike it. as system about marking areas were pkm from a specific level range can only spawn would work better.

At the normal arenas players woudl fight trough, but at the harder oens, they would run trough with defeated team to boss, set home and then teleport back with full team, i already see that there ist he „your team is dead so you die“ option in 1.20, but thats not the problem, it would be more helpfull when i could say, that if the players team dies out in the area/from the trainer, he gets portet back to the start of the arena.

Later there are Expert Arenas, but Players who can stall, win easily, because the AI cant stall/cant stall break, so what's the best option i can do?
i made a full-power-anti-type-team, in short: if its a dragon trainer, each pkm have atleast 1 attack to counter ice, dragon and fairy, so dragon,grass,ground,flying,psycho,ghost attacks, but there are even more types and specific strong non-legendaries that need a counter(blaziken,scizor bullet-punch), otherwise they swept the whole team AND bosstype +10-20 level. ( a +15 is needed cause i experienced, it would be the best balanced)

I have to say i(and the players that like some challenge) kinda like it, i saw players getting taken down by the one high speed/dmg pkm, or by weird mechanics like cofagrigus mummy ability, they needed to invest thinking, training and breeding to take down the expert grunts and bosses, but the real problem was that the mod itself doesnt invest the players much into the battle mechanics and mainly just bash trough everything with a lvl 100 legendaries team, so a big diffculty step appeared

3. Armor/Equipment
The dusk armor effect of no hunger is just way to op compared to all others, next in line is the thunder armor with haste III for building/mining and then waterstone to farm water pkm or fossils for money.

The Leafstone bonemeal effect was something we had to bring out as an unbreakable tool, because to many aprico trees made the server slow, and players rly overdid it.
moonstone nightvision ist he second most popular extra effect of the tools and the firestone torch, the water/magmastone to turn lava/water to obsidian couldnt be disabled, so you can grief the spawn world with it…. We didnt wanted to but the external mvoes of pkm did the same, so whe had to disable them so nobody can grief protected areas with it .

4. TCG, nobody rly cared, why cant we define rules for a fight at the battlebox like with pokemon trainer battles?

5. Curry, why is this there? Nobody cared again because its not usefull in any way (players cant even eat it)
a mechanic were i need to feed my active team reguliary with ONLY curry-like food would be great, timer is frozen while in PC/Rancher and they suffer a max-20% stat reduction when starving, while after being full they are "well fed" for ~30 min, were they dont loose hunger, so its not to annoying

6. many hate the new TM system, with different regional TM’s, we needed to disable that you can only use right region on right pkm, but its still a giant storage problem to have up to 7 times the same TM for each region

7. Shingle/pokesand corner block, is it finally fixed? That it rotates like terractora blocks? nobody can use them like this

8. Gold and Silver Symbol (Badge), drops from defeated frontier brains, they would be great to be used as special otherwise unobtainable badges, but what are frontier brains? Why does the item exist but not the droplocation from the flavor text? hy does the flavor text exist if there is no droplocation?

9. The copper/silver/gold coins are used as special diligent currency, which drops from our placed trainers and can be used to get stuff like shiny, special textures or the dynamax band , so players rerun the arenas to get it
So i dont rly like the higher quantities of them from structures in current 1.16+, would be great if can get good placeholder unobtainalbe items that can be used the same

10. vanilla mobs
They still spawned from spawners or eggs dropped from chicken-like pkm, which made a great automatic food or xp farm.
Why are pixelmon non-quest-giving npc’s useless? Everybody just digs a 1x2 hole and puts them in, adn forget they exist, we atleast should be able to trade with them like with normal villagers.

The 1.16+ version has config to replace mobs with specific pkm, but thats imo a bad solution, cause it can rly fast make the pkm and the drops useless, if players farm them, and they will.

Also its somewhat making ALL the vanilla combat stuff, from shields, swords, bow, and 80% of enchanchtments unnecessary, i dont say we should fight pkm with sword and bow, only that the vanilla structure loot should still be protected by mobs, otherwise is just way to easy to get, and mining is already easy enough without mobs
later i made a Area with mob spawners and the ability to sell the drops for the diligent currency while also dropping special armor and having bosses, so player can use their fight equipment somewere

11. League
we have 4 traienrs, each giving a otherwise unobtainable badge, and players need to contact moderators to give them the badges to try champion 1 time, it works but, needing specific items in inventory to start a fight would be a way much better way, that should be a base funtion in the mod


thats all i could find for now, i know about some of the changes to 1.16+ but not all
pls take some considerations, before implementing more rich-filled lootpools or other changes that contradict the vanilla-core gameplay and altrough the mod already tries to act like a sandbox for players, most servers dont use all the existing mechanics to the fulliest, like i try

User avatar
By SKyTheThunder
#241023 Thanks for the expansive feedback. Usually we prefer having individual suggestions split into different threads though, to avoid these massive walls of text, which may discourage people from engaging with our ideas. But I guess since this is thematically related to the overall difficulty/progression discussion, there is an argument to be made to bundle these here.

I'd like to address some of your points that I feel are a bit subjective or could use context:

  1. The legendary spawn system was mainly meant as a placeholder until we get around to implementing individual mechanics for all legendaries. Sadly the saying "nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution" applies here. We haven't had the free manpower to give individual events/quests to many more legendaries over the past years, with everything else that requires work - but considerably expanding the current overall system feels a bit like wasted effort if we're planning to move away from it anyway...

    That said, we are looking into the spawn distribution and tweaking rates to try and make it as functional as possible.

    We're always looking for people to help us speed up development, so we can get done with the necessary work faster, and into expanding the rest of these features.

  2. Map makers can freely configure all natural spawn settings via Data Pack, specifically to address things like regional level progression or spawn variety. The Spawn Info lets you set the spawn level range for Pokémon, and coordinates can be used as Spawn Condition - in combination making the respective Pokémon spawn at certain levels in a certain fixed area.
    This was already possible via External JSON files back in the 1.12.2 versions, but using Minecraft's Data Pack system in 1.16.5+ it can be directly installed to the world itself, not affecting any other instance running on the same system.

    The standard features are geared towards the standard open world. By default wild spawns scale with your team's highest level to smooth progression, until they uncap above lvl 50 (which mainly unlocks spawns of lower levels since higher ones are very rare).
    There's also the distance-based level increase, which can be activated in the Config and will make wild levels depend on their distance from the world spawn.

    We're looking into more options for level progression - however, neither of these will (or can) ever exactly fit your very specific map layout. The main features will always have to fit the regular procedurally generated open world, since that is the default experience. A custom adventure will always require custom configurations.


    Gym difficulty and balance is something we're looking into currently. They are however meant to be a late game challenge and the intention is for them to be hard - so it'll likely be more of a slight tweak than a whole-sale revamp from the point they're at currently. Lower tier battles might offer a more gradual approach to those. Definitely on our list.

  3. I agree that the Evo Stone Armors/Tools could use a rebalancing. 9Tales just posted a suggestion regarding that, which I think has an interesting approach: https://pixelmonmod.com/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=58193

  4. At the moment the TCG is pretty barebones. As with legendaries, it's mainly a manpower issue.

  5. Like in the original games, Curries are powerful healing items that - depending on tier - have a number of benefits, from Exp. gain over Happiness to PP restoration.
    I agree that they should be edible for players as well though.

    The other feature you suggest is something I don't see happening, personally. It would be counterintuitive for players who are used to the gameplay of the original Pokémon games. Players often already avoid player hunger because it can be tedious - I don't think adding something similar to your Pokémon would be well received.

  6. Regional TMs were implemented because the old hybrid system just wasn't maintainable anymore. Having all TMs that ever existed in one giant pool was near impossible to keep track of (I believe there were several duplicates in the end) and maintaining the Pokémon's mixed learn sets was similarly chaotic.

    Having them split into the exact sets that existed in the respective main line games makes that much more consistent in every regard. Learn sets simply follow the exact lists from the original games and a new block can be added for a new generation, without having to consolidate all of it by hand. And players can rely on their knowledge regarding TM numbers from the main games.

    By default only the set from the latest generation should be widely available, which should keep the numbers in check. And with drops mainly giving Blank TMs, you're able to imprint specifically those TMs you want, without having to collect tons of useless ones.

  7. Those old blocks are remnants from the early days of the mod and haven't really been addressed since. They need a bit of a general rework I think - including the question whether they have a purpose at all anymore.

  8. The Symbols are a set of Badges from the Gen3 games, obtained in the Battle Frontier. Their flavor text references that. Like most other Badges they are unobtainable by default and mainly exist in case a server/map maker wants to use them for anything.

  9. Similar to the majority of Badges (as mentioned above), Pixelmon has an entire category of normally unobtainable Quest Items. These can be used freely by servers/map makers to implement their own features - including changing their sprites/names/flavor text via Resource Pack if needed.

  10. As you addressed, in any recent version Vanilla mobs that bypass the regular Vanilla spawn system (which Pixelmon disables by default) are caught by the Spawn Replacement feature. In most cases this should not really be noticeable and integrate into regular gameplay - maybe an irregular spawn here or there.
    Farmable replacements are something we are actively looking into right now, making sure that they're not disproportionately common compared to the respective species' natural spawns.

    All NPCs generated with villages should have a purpose. Generic chatting NPCs don't spawn naturally by default - all "normal" NPCs are Quest Givers who will attempt to generate a new quest every Dusk/Dawn.

    Vanilla combat is not part of Pixelmon's scope. Our focus is on implementing the Pokémon gameplay into Minecraft's open world sandbox system. Trying to blend those core mechanics together would be a massive undertaking to get it right, between balancing, progression, all the additional potential sources for bugs, etc., etc...
    You do have the option to reactivate or otherwise implement Vanilla mobs, if you like - as you have done - but it's not what we want the core Pixelmon experience to be.

  11. We've been looking into how to best implement a League (or League-like feature) on and off for ages. But as with several other feature expansions, it usually came down to a lack of manpower to concept, create, implement and balance a feature like that. Adding things like that is much more complex internally than it often looks to the outside, with tons of concerns affecting every step of the way - starting with "do we even have all the prerequisites to support this specific feature in place?"

    It is on our list of things we'd love to add. Can't say if/when we can get around to it yet.
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By 9Tales
#241027 3. I wouldn't be opposed to having two new config settings: one that allows disabling evo stone armor effects and one that allows disabling evo stone tool effects. Maybe a third config setting for whether to allow "destructive" evolution stone tool effects. That would of course include Fire Stone and Water Stone and likely Leaf Stone and Sun Stone. Or you could toggle on/off all the effects in the config one by one. I do feel that the Leaf Stone tool should also have more durability.

5. Curry is a nice healing item. One niche it has is that it can be used to restore PP. Ethers and Elixirs aren't easy to come by. It's also a quick way of increasing happiness. I disagree with the curry hunger mechanic, since that would become bothersome. Takes time to make curries, so even if I have a lot of ingredients I'm likely only going to make a few. Plus, we shouldn't be forcing players to use such a random mechanic. And I agree that they should be edible for players. I likely would have suggested it myself if someone hadn't already suggested it a long time ago.

10. Without the mobs, those items aren't as useful, but no one's forcing you to make or keep them. Swords are helpful when exploring mineshafts to break the cobwebs anyway. Also, you are able to disable particular spawn replacements with a datapack, by setting enabled to false in the particular file under data/pixelmon/spawn_replacements. So you can disable the spawn replaces of the hostile mobs. Spawner spawns would spawn the hostile mobs rather than Pokemon. So would any mobs that spawn with the structure. Meanwhile, you wouldn't get the hostile mobs spawning randomly throughout the world (that would require enabling vanilla mobs in the config).
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